The present invention relates to an electronic camera using a memory card as a recording medium.
For electronic cameras which are being popular in recent years, the image quality, i.e., the number of pixels constructing image data has greatly improved along with development of CCD image sensing elements. Accordingly, the data amount per image data is increasing.
A current electronic camera which uses a memory card with a nonvolatile flash ROM as a mainstream recording medium has a limited recording capacity. For this reason, memory cards with larger capacities have been sequentially developed and are commercially available.
Under these circumstances, an electronic camera having, in place of a memory card, a hard disk device or magnetooptical disk device capable of recording a larger quantity of image data has been proposed.
However, an electronic camera having a hard disk device or magnetooptical disk device has the following problem. Since the recording medium has a rotating member, power is required to rotate the recording medium for recording/reproduction, and a battery with a larger capacity is indispensable although the recording medium itself can be made compact to some extent and also incorporated in the camera body. As a result, the entire electronic camera becomes so bulky that it is unsuitable for a compact electronic camera which is easy to carry.